Israel Matzav

Iran: Unsafe to fly

Last week, a Caspian Air jet went down minutes after takeoff from Tehran's Imam Khomeni Airport, killing all 188 people on board. At the Weekly Standard, Ruben Johnson points out that this is just the latest in a series of crashes involving Iranian jets, and is the result of poor maintenance and flying aircraft that are beyond their useful life. That in turn is the result of continued sanctions against the Iranian regime by the United States.

Dangerous airlines with aircraft falling apart are not a novelty in poor nations. There are quite a few nations that have a ramshackle domestic airline fleet, but at the same time they manage to maintain aviation regulatory standards for their international flights. This is generally due to their ability to replace older-model airliners, some of them of Russian-made, with newer Boeing and Airbus aircraft. Russian domestic airlines, for example, have had a checkered aviation safety record, but its national carrier now operates a fleet of mostly U.S. and European-made aircraft.

This equation works for almost every nation except Iran. The 1996 U.S. Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) prohibits the sale of most U.S. and European-made commercial aircraft to Iran. As a consequence the country continues to utilize a combination of aging western 1970s and used 1980s and early 1990s Russian aircraft--all of which are becoming increasingly unsafe. Caspian Airlines is a typical case in point. It is a Russian-Iranian joint venture which, up until before the crash, operated six used Tu-154Ms as its entire fleet.

But, the poster child for the ills of Iran's passenger aircraft fleet is the old Boeing 707. Most airlines around the world retired these models long ago, but Iran's Saha Airlines has the dubious distinction of being the world's last airline to keep a 707 in scheduled passenger service. A U.S. aircraft engineer whom I spoke to at one of the Iran air show expositions in Kish Island in the Persian Gulf told me "these 707s are still flying, but they should not be. None of the automated systems on-board work anymore and the crew has to do almost everything manually."

Sanctions as rigid as the ILSA dictates means that when it comes to commercial jets the highest common denominator is still fairly low in Iran. One of the ancient 707s that is supposed to be best of all the models available in the country is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's personal aircraft--Iran's Air Force One equivalent. It was described as a battered and worn-out when it taxied up to the red carpet for last month's summit in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Next to the other heads of states' VIP jets it looked like the flatbed truck from The Beverly Hillbillies parked next to the usual assortment of Mercedes, Lexus and BMW automobiles on Rodeo Drive.

Because of Iran's mountainous terrain and wide distances between its cities the country needs a reliable air travel network, but its continued isolation from the world community is gradually providing its population with transportation options that are worse than most Third World countries. The only countries Iran has no problems purchasing passenger aircraft from are Russia and China, but most of Russia's commercial production lines are shut down and China's only modern-design regional airliner, the ARJ21, has too many major U.S. components in its configuration to get past the ILSA embargo lists.

Normally, the plight of the ordinary population in this type of situation (and the fact that they continue to die needlessly in air crashes) is of little to no bother to a dictatorial regime like Iran's, but these crashes of falling-apart aircraft have also affected Iran's military. In 2006 a Dassault/Mystere model Falcon 20 VIP light transport crashed near the city of Orumiyeh killing all eleven passengers and two crew members on board. Among those killed in the crash were Ahmad Kazemi, the Commander of the Ground Forces of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a veteran of Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq.

The other ten killed in this crash were the commander of the IRGC's 27th Rassoulollah army Saeed Mohtadi, Deputy Commander of Ground Forces for Operation Affairs Saeed Soleymani, the Official in Charge of Information for Ground Forces Hanif Montazer-Qaem, the Commander of Artillery Units Gholam-Reza Yazdani, two members of the Ground Forces' Command Office, Hamid Azinpour and Mohsen Asadi, Deputy Commander of Ground Forces Safdar Reshadi, and IRGC Colonels Ahmad Elhaminejad and Morteza Basiri. Then in 2007, a Russian-made military plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing another 36 members of the IRGC.

Ahmadinejad said that he is willing to sacrifice half his people for a chance to destroy Israel. If enough Iranians keep flying, he has a chance of doing that before he ever deploys a nuclear weapon.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:36 PM